So when I left you last I was just going to go to bed early as we had to get up at 6am to catch our flight to Tasmania. My plan backfired slightly when Susie logged into Skype and I got to talk to her, Mum, Catherine, Jo, Lou, George, Grace, Samuel and Joshua on the web cam! It was so exciting and best of all FREE!

I managed to crawl out of bed and we caught our flight with no dramas. We then had to pick up our shiny hire car. I was a bit apprehensive about having to drive a manual car especially when the indicator switch was on the wrong side of the steering wheel and I kept accidentally wiping the windscreen! Also kept hitting the brake thinking it was the clutch so bounced along a bit. Still at least they drive on the proper side of the road...

We managed to find our hotel despite the crazy one way system of Hobart getting us in a muddle. The main roads in Hobart have four lanes (this is a city much smaller than Portsmouth and much less cramped so what on Earth they need all those lanes for I don't know!) a left turn lane, two straight on lanes and a right turn lane which means crossing three lanes if you go from a left turn to a right. Luckily it's not overly busy and we didn't have any trouble but it was quite scary!

Hobart is a lovely old city (well more of a town but it is the state capital of Tasmania) and we started off having lunch in Salamanca Square and wandering around Battery Point (the old centre of commerce) before frog marching ourselves on the half hour walk (lie by Lonely Planet, more like ¾ to an hour) to the Cascade Brewery, the longest continually running brewery in Oz. It's in a beautiful old building (see attached photo) but they made us wear hi-vis jackets and goggles for the tour so after the sweaty march (Tassie wasn't as cold and wet as we were led to believe, another lie from LP!) we looked very very attractive! I paid a lot of attention obviously as the guy was telling us useful facts about the brewing process and making us smell various pots of hops and malt. At the end we were given three bottle tops each to 'spend' at the bar. We tried two beers (the pale and the green) and then stuck with cider for the rest and a final glass of yummy raspberry cordial! So hardcore - we really did try to like the beer but the cider was just tastier!

The following day we took the car on a merry jaunt around the outskirts of Hobart firstly to the top of Mount Nelson where there was an old semaphore tower and then to the top of the much higher Mount Wellington. It was a beautiful sunny, clear day but try as we might we couldn't quite see all the way to China as the Lonely Planet told us we could (lies!) The view was phenomenal though and we could see over the whole city including the mouth of the Derwent River that forms a natural harbour that could fit the whole of the British Naval Fleet in at the time it was discovered (apparently). I only slightly hit a pole when parking the car! We then crossed to the other side of town and took a walk around the Botanic Gardens which was lovely and peaceful and had some beautiful big old trees. So that was for me, then we headed to the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (via the Cathedral) for Kirsti (nice compromise between a tree geek and a museum geek!) which was quite interesting, full of stuffed Tassie creatures and an exhibition about Antarctic exploration. We then tried to find a restaurant recommended by Claire Bear, as it was her birthday, called Da Angelos, we found it but they had no tables for at least 20 minutes so we headed back to Salamanca place for pizza in a different location.

And that was the end of Hobart a part from a morning spent at Port Arthur which was the penal colony established in the 1830s for the really naughty convicts. It's on a peninsula with a narrow strip of land connecting it to the mainland that was patrolled by dogs. It was a harsh prison camp where the prisoners were put to hard physical labour wearing leg irons. Many of the buildings are in ruin but some have been restored. Our tickets included a boat tour of the harbour around the Island of the Dead, where the prisoners were buried in unmarked graves if they died before they were released, and the Point Buer boys' prison for reforming and educating teenage boys that were too young to work in the main prison. At one point there was no land between us and Antartica! It felt different to Alcatraz somehow, even though the prisoners there had committed the most horrendous crimes we wound up feeling sorry for them. The prisoners at Port Arthur were transported from England for often petty crimes and then transferred to Port Arthur for further crimes within the colony. It seemed really harsh punishment for what they had done but I found it really hard to appreciate exactly what the prisoners had to go through when it was a beautiful sunny day and the setting was so gorgeous. I didn't have quite the same haunting effect.